Not Spending Money

Research shows that turning down your thermostat by even a few degrees can result in significant energy cost savings over time.

Personally, I get cold easily.  I hate being cold.  Turning down my thermostat even slightly means being more cold.  In my own home, I have decided that keeping the heat up is one of the little luxuries that I don’t mind splurging on.  However, I have not always had lived in situations where I’ve had control of the thermostat, and luckily, I have learned a lot of stay-warm techniques that do not involve cranking up the heat.  Here are seven ideas for maintaining a comfortable body temperature in a colder house.

1.  Dress warmer.

Instead of wearing thin summer pajamas in the wintertime or expecting to stay warm with sweat pants and a Tshirt, get comfortable wearing another layer inside the house.  Even just putting on a sweatshirt, robe, or switching to winter flannel pajamas can help keep you warm when your thermostat’s turned down.  And keeping socks or slippers on your feet while in the house can also help keep you warm.

2. Use blankets

I like to curl up under throw blankets when reading in my living room. You can also add an extra blanket or two to all the beds in the house to keep everyone snug when you turn the thermostat down at night.

3.  Move Around More

My favorite indoor activities involve lounging around, but there are lots of things to do to get the blood circulating.  Do you have any interior decorating projects you’ve been putting off?  What about organizing that closet?  Do you have gift wrapping to do?  Is there a room you want to rearrange?  If you avoid your normal exercise routine because it involves walking, running, or scraping ice off the car to go to the gym, can you re-create an indoor version?

4.  Spend more time outside

Especially when it’s cold outside, spending time outdoors will make the inside seem warmer.  This may seem counterintuitive, because spending time in a cold outside will make you colder, except that chances are you’ll be moving about a lot more outside.  Maybe you’re shoveling snow for yourself or your neighbors. Maybe you’re hanging Christmas lights or finding the best walk in your neighborhood to view the change in seasons. Like #3, this suggestion gets your blood circulating and will warm you up.  And then when you come back inside, it will feel toasty warm.

5.  Drink hot beverages.

Maybe this is why I learned to love tea. Regular tea, in my opinion, tastes best with a little milk and sugar, although some people prefer it without. There are a variety of herbal teas that don’t have the bitterness of regular tea.  Coffee, hot chocolate, warm milk, hot cider, wassail, and various other concoctions are all good at warming the insides. If you are a regular drinker of plain water, try switching to hot water during the colder seasons.

6.  Stop all the drafts.

Thin windows, ill-fitting doors, uninsulated walls are all ways for the cold to sink in.  Even hanging up blankets over passageways or windows can help trap the heat in.

7. Cook a lot

Having the oven and stove on throughout the day will create a lot of heat in the kitchen, and spending time there will make it one of the warmest rooms in the house.  There’s the added benefit of eating the hot food once it’s prepared.

Image courtesy of freefoto.com

There are about a million things I want to do with my house.  I would like to update the kitchen and bath, refinish the floors, replace the windows, paint the exterior, and landscape the yard, just to name a few small projects.  It’s not that the house is in bad shape; it’s not. It’s a trim little house with everything in order.  But it’s an older home, and I like to dream big.  It’s just how my brain works.

I don’t have the money right for new windows or refinished floors or climbing roses. Since I’ve been making the house a priority, my “Things I Want” account is at a minimum.  I pretty much just got a Big Thing I Want (the house), and that’s it for a while.  But that doesn’t mean that I can’t make any progress, or that my hands are tied until my next paycheck comes in, or that I have to sit around being grumpy because there’s an endless supply of things to spend money on.

So I made my dream to-do list and included everything on it. Everything.

Then I wrote another one, which only had things I could do for free.

Amazingly, there was a lot on that second list.  And what was surprising (or maybe not so surprising) was that each item requires work.  Some items require a LOT of work.

For example, my perfect future garden needs a compost pile– that doesn’t cost anything.  But I’ve been too lazy to put my fruit and veggie trash in a separate pile, too busy to walk around my yard and decide on the best spot, too distracted to rake leaves into a pile.

My perfect future garden also has flowers. I haven’t decided on what kind yet, but flowers can be expensive.  As a housewarming present to myself I even bought a huge bag of daffodil bulbs to plant, just so I can get started before the winter.  But I had been too busy to plant bulbs, and it’s been a little chilly outside and I needed a nap.

And I can just imagine how nice the yard would look edged in a nice mulch where I want the future beds and paths to go– I could put a really nice bark up against the house and edge the walkway.  But fall leaves, which make a wonderful mulch, are free for the taking and would nicely blanket all my trees, if only I raked them up.  But raking leaves is not nearly as much fun as getting a truckload of bark, and they don’t always look as professional.

Inside the house it’s the same. I want built-in bookshelves, but haven’t found the time to unpack all my books on to the existing shelves, or the energy to piece together all my old cheap bookshelves.  I want a guest bed and fresh new bedding, but I haven’t found time to do my laundry this week yet.  I want new windows, but have yet to scrape off years of accumulated paint from the original tile windowsills.

I realized I have plenty to do and get excited about without spending a cent.

Once I made my new list, I realized that part of what is so exciting about spending money is that you can feel like you are making progress without actually doing a lot of work.

The daffodil bulbs were the prime example. Just by buying that big bag for myself, I felt like I already had put in an entire garden, without actually breaking a sweat. But of course, the bulbs sat there, in my kitchen, near the dirty dishes, nowhere particularly near my garden.  The spending part of the fun was over, but I hadn’t actually accomplished what I was paying for when I bought them.

So last Saturday, I had time, and I had my daffodils. I spent the day planting the entire bag; one hundred and twenty five bulbs.  Then I raked my lawn.  And last night, I scraped the old paint off one single tile on my windowsill.  It looks beautiful.

Some day, when I save enough, I can put in new windows.  But not today.  I’m too busy.

Image courtesy of FreeFoto.com

In reading this blog, one might get the impression that I am against spending money.

This is not true. I love spending money. But it’s simply not a very sustainable pasttime.

Saving isn’t an end by itself.  It really doesn’t do me any good to die with millions of dollars in the bank because I’ve prided themselves on an aescetic existance. Or worse, because I’ve been stingy and avoided using my money to make the world a better place, such as paying for a hospital, donating to libraries, or even just stimulating the economy.  Money’s true power really only comes into play when it exchanges hands.

But you can’t spend money you don’t have coming in. In order to have enough to spend on something you really want, you have to say no to the things that in the long run, really aren’t that big of a deal to you.  And you have to say yes to the things that are. We work hard to save where we can so that we can spend where we want.

The other day, I bought a house.

It’s not a large house. But I wouldn’t have been able to do it at all if I hadn’t started bringing lunch to work every day.

For you, it might be retirement. Or the proverbial “rainy day” (As this past year’s massive layoffs have shown, rainy days do happen.) Or it might be a trip. Or that thing you wanted. Or college. Or someone else’s college. Or maybe you’re saving enough to be able to quit work and save off the interest.  Whatever it is, spending money isn’t evil. But most of the time, the more you save, the more choices you have in your spending. We all have the equivalent of a house that we want, that is difficult to afford, that we’d really not mind making sacrifices for if we only knew it was attainable.

And that’s what helps us make the little choices– when we know that the little choices add up to big ones.

What’s your house?